This week I am delighted to once again be in the city that never sleeps: New York. In addition to enjoying the shopping and dining of New York, I am excited to be attending this year’s 101st National Retail Federation Convention & Expo (NRF). With over 22,000 retail professionals from 82 countries attending to discuss the industry’s most critical topics, this year’s NRF promises to be full of innovations that will seamlessly integrate technology into everyday shopping.

As a woman who loves fashion, I am particularly excited by the NRF demonstration of Cisco’s StyleMe, a virtual fashion mirror that would allow me to explore the store’s inventory database to find what I want, virtually try it on, and accessorize. While creating my outfit I can also capture images to send for approval by my personal fashionistas – my daughters.

Dodging downed power lines isn’t fun. But building a self-healing, reliable smart grid to help eliminate costly downed power lines is. And it just got easier to build your business in the utilities sector with our newly expanded Connected Grid portfolio of solutions and services.

This “whole offer” pumps up Cisco’s relevancy in this market segment—and, more importantly, puts our partners at the forefront of this important transition.

With the Connected Grid portfolio, you can offer customers the end-to-end intelligence they need to update the world’s electrical grids. And the entire process begins with the all-inclusive blueprint known as the Cisco GridBlocks Architecture.

This brand-new architecture provides a forward-looking view of integrating the electrical grid, as well as specific network deployment guidance. It also includes a framework to help with the design and deployment of comprehensive grid management and security solutions.

So don’t think this innovative, multi-service communications platform—the utility industry’s first—is reserved solely for partners already working with customers in this space. It provides an excellent opportunity for partners who want to generate new sources of revenue.

At Cisco, we’ve talked many times before about the exhaustion of IPv4 address space and the need for the industry to adopt IPv6 to support the explosion in the number of people, devices, and web services and enable the continuing growth of the Internet. As you can read in the announcement on our corporate blog, today Cisco joined with other leading industry participants such as AT&T, Google, Facebook, Comcast, and Time Warner Cable to be part of the World IPv6 Launch. This means that by June 6, 2012 all participants will permanently enable IPv6 on their networks and websites.

Since deployment of IPv6 requires an industry-wide response we recently teamed with Excentis to participate in Read More »

On my flight home Friday after a full week at the 2012 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), I was reflecting on how mobility is more important than ever before. This comes as no surprise considering the success of consumer devices and our need to be mobile in our day-to-day lives. Now, the real opportunity is how we bring mobility, video and cloud together to create the next generation internet.

At CES, Cisco showed up strong, sharing with customers, the analyst community and the media how we’re making the internet more visual by leveraging the power of Read More »

This week’s Data Center Deconstructed Q&A item isn’t quite phrased that way, but if you consider the history of refrigeration that’s the riddle we’re pondering. It’s a good one to figure out; Data Center designers and operators face the issue daily as part of their mission to create efficient server environments.

Some of the individuals posting to this site, including the moderators, work for Cisco Systems. Opinions expressed here and in any corresponding comments are the personal opinions of the original authors, not of Cisco. The content is provided for informational purposes only and is not meant to be an endorsement or representation by Cisco or any other party. This site is available to the public. No information you consider confidential should be posted to this site. By posting you agree to be solely responsible for the content of all information you contribute, link to, or otherwise upload to the Website and release Cisco from any liability related to your use of the Website. You also grant to Cisco a worldwide, perpetual, irrevocable, royalty-free and fully-paid, transferable (including rights to sublicense) right to exercise all copyright, publicity, and moral rights with respect to any original content you provide. The comments are moderated. Comments will appear as soon as they are approved by the moderator.